In case you were wondering, yes, the Smiley Puzzle Project is still alive! While the actual games are still under development, the project has gotten a new scope.

As discussed before, the SmileyPuzzleGames.com site was intended to become a small games arcade featuring my smiley related games. But instead of developing this site, it seemed like a better idea to take it a few steps further, and actually build a full-blown online games arcade.

So I registered the SmileyGamer.com domain, and started building my arcade based on PHPArcadeScript. It’s now in a reasonable state, which I just declared the beta stage, so have a look for yourself:

Some of the reasons for dropping my original plans:

• A full-blown arcade can be used to showcase my own games to a wide audience.
• If I can let my arcade grow and start getting serious traffic, the site can start generating some decent advertising income.
• I will spread freeware versions of my own Flash games to other arcade sites, with links to my arcade, as a way to get more traffic.
• Since I wont be focusing on smiley related games alone, a general games arcade is a better home for my first Flash game, Enigmatica, and my java game Bubblomania.
• Also, I will not only make puzzle games, but other genres as well. So the SmileyGamer.com domain is better suited than SmileyPuzzleGames.com.

This change of plans also means I will be focusing my attention to webgames made with Flash, rather than downloadable games made with Java. I wrote previously about why to make this switch. I might still decide to make a downloadable version if any of my webgames becomes wildly popular, but for now, sticking to webgames makes more business sense.

If you visit the site, and find any problems or have feedback, please let me know by using the contact page on the Smiley Gamer site, or leave a comment here on this blog.

The free online gaming site Game Garage was the first one to buy a license of my Flash puzzle game Enigmatica. Yesterday the game went live on their site, and it’s now featured as the Game of the Week!

Play Enigmatica!

In a few weeks, the game will also become available on this site, and a couple of others. If you would like to add it to your own website, contact me!

My online java game, Bubblomania, has been updated to version 1.1. The most obvious change is the addition of music! This was long overdue, but I finally found some time to do it. There are also a number of smaller improvements under the hood, and to the site.

Bubblomania is available for licensing, meaning that you can put a branded version of the game of your own website. More info about that is available here. Note that my Flash puzzle game, Enigmatica, is also available for licensing now!

Last week I completed my very first Flash game, written in ActionScript 3! Almost a month ago I wrote about switching from Java to Flash for web game development.

As the first game to learn Flash, I chose Enigmatica, a game I made a long time ago for Nokia mobile phones. It’s a unique and challenging puzzle game, which I think is suited for an online version. Now that I have some experience with Photoshop, I could make the graphics better than those for the mobiles. I tried to make the graphical style different from the average flash games, which usually look very vectorized.

To monetize this game, I’m currently trying to sell licenses to online gaming websites. When I get accepted to MochiAds, an ad network for casual games, I’m also going to distribute an ad-supported version for free. So, if you have a website with online games and are interested in buying a license, please contact me!

Today I woke up, realizing it’s already March! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re having fun! It’s that time again to ponder a bit about my business and what happened during the last month. Checking my blog, I noticed I only published 3 articles last month…

On the other hand, this blog is getting more visitors again, thanks to the article To Flash Or Not To Flash, which was included in the second Carnival of Game Production on GameProducer.net! I’ll follow up on that article soon, when I have some screenshots of the first Flash game I’m currently developing.

It’s also still doing good with Text-Link-Ads, thanks to these sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and Skill games.

Our Speeltijd.net site has had a little fallback again, with 6792 visitors last month (15% down). Of course february was a couple of days shorter than january As a consequence, Google Adsense income also dropped. But the good news is that I received my money from Google for the first time since I started using Adsense, little over a year ago. I had let the money pile up a bit, so it was already over $250!

I’ve been thinking about my business model last month, and decided to change it a bit. More precisely, I’m going to move from the shareware model to a combined model: webgames with advertising and a deluxe shareware version for the popular webgames. This is also the main reason I’m partly moving to Flash.

There’s a huge audience for free online games, and there are an increasing number of possibilities for developers to monetize on them, using advertising. Of course, it’s also a great method to make more people aware of the deluxe shareware version, although the conversion rate with this audience will be pretty low. I’ll write more about this as my plans develop!

That’s the question that has been wandering around in my mind recently.

It all started with a surprising statistic: from all the unique visitors to www.bubblomania.com since the beginning of this year, only about 13% actually entered their name in the Bubblomania webgame. When the game is started, it asks first-time users for a nickname for the topscores, so this way I can measure how many different people have played it. Of course there are people who visit the site without starting the game, or who don’t want to type in a nickname. But I find it hard to believe that 87% of visitors are like that.

So maybe there’s a technological aspect to this. When I tried to license the Bubblomania webgame to other websites, like online arcades, the major problem turned out to be the fact that it’s not a Flash game. Arcade owners complained about this, because they use standard PHP scripts that only accept Flash, and not Java applets.

Bubblomania is written in Java, using the LWJGL library. I’ve written previously why I like these technologies. But the feedback on the game made me doubt my decision. I still think Java and LWJGL are great tools to make downloadable games that need the performance. But they’re probably the wrong tools to make webgames…

Some of the problems encountered:

• Long applet loading time, which cannot be used to display something useful (like logo’s, advertisements,…). This is the biggest turn-off for people who tried to play the game for the first time.
• There seem to be quite a lot of people who do not have a recent version of the JRE installed. Furthermore, installing Java can be a difficult process for inexperienced computer users. The download is also rather large. Too much trouble just to play a webgame.
• LWJGL requires the applet to be signed, thus requiring the user to confirm (s)he wants to run it. This can be confusing for people who have never seen this before.
• LWJGL contains an OpenGL binding, and thus requires a video driver that supports OpenGL for hardware acceleration. It suprised me how many PC’s don’t have up-to-date drivers, resulting the game to run very slowly using the software renderer. Again, nobody goes through the trouble of updating drivers to play an unknown webgame.
• Using LWJGL in an applet still results in some strange behaviour on some configurations.

So last weekend I decided to investigate the use of Flash for future webgames, so I wont have these problems again. According to Adobe, 98% of PC’s have some version of Flash installed.

This interesting article on AjaxWorld Magazine by Bruce Eckel pointed out to me that the new Flash 9/ActionScript 3 is the way to go for internet applications, thanks to increased performance of the new ActionScript virtual machine. Since the Flex 2 SDK is available for free, I decided to use that as my platform. It only supports the new ActionScript 3, but since I’m a total noob to Flash, I might as well start with the latest and greatest!

After spending a few days with the documentation, and playing with the Flex Builder trial version, I can say that switching from Java to ActionScript 3 and the Flash API ain’t all that hard. I’ve made a small prototype using the Bubblomania assets, to get a feel for the performance. And while it’s nowhere near the performance of Java + LWJGL, it was better than I expected.

So, am I going to switch from Java to Flash for game development? Well, yes and no. I’m definitely going to use Flash for the web versions of the Smiley Puzzle Project games, since these games do not require a high framerate to be playable. I’ll probably investigate if it’s possible to do a higher quality downloadable version of these games in Flash.

But for action games like Bubblomania, I’m going to stick to Java for the downloadable version. I should mention that the final 1.0 version of LWJGL has been released recently, and it has become a very decent library!

It’s been a while since my last blog post… I’ve been sick for a couple of days (which is not good when you don’t get paid!), and working hard on the other days.

So, what have I been up to recently? I’ve been doing the (mostly digital) paperwork to become officially independent. So I’ll soon have my own company, which is the Belgian equivalent of a US sole proprietorship company (i think). And I also spoke to an accountant about a couple of issues. The internet business thing is still relatively new, and even for an accountant it’s not always clear

Game production-wise, I’m working on 2 prototypes for new games. One of them, codenamed Smiley Memory, will be part of the Smiley Puzzle Project. It’s based on the classic Memory game, in this case matching smileys, with some action added. I designed it together with my girlfriend, and she’s helping with the level design!

The other one is a very early prototype of a secret action game, codenamed Quantum Chaser. The thing’s gotta have a name, right?

It’s been very quiet around the Smiley Puzzle Project on this blog. So it’s time for a sneak peek at my current plans, which I hope to realise during this year. Quite a while ago, I registered 2 domains to be used for this project: www.SmileyPuzzleGames.com and www.SmileyPuzzle.com.

The first one is intended to become a small online games arcade, with multiple puzzle games, all featuring 3D animated smileys. I have several ideas for puzzle games, for which I will first make a webgame version. The most popular games will get a deluxe downloadable version. Today I made a logo which should give a first impression of the concept. A larger version can be seen at the Smiley Puzzle Games website itself.

The second domain, just named Smiley Puzzle, is a short and nice sounding name that currently forwards to the Smiley Puzzle Project category on this blog. But it will be the main site for the first downloadable Smiley Puzzle game.

Why create puzzle games with smileys? Well, the obvious reason is that I like both smileys and puzzle games! The smiley is one of the icons of the internet age, and the cool 3D looking ones are very popular with kids (thank you, MSN). So it is my hope that smiley themed games will attract people.

My goal is to make mentally challenging puzzle games, not the mind-numbing variant. But they also have to be accessible to a large demographic, and kids in particular. The games should be easy to learn and play, and entertaining enough that it’s not seen as a heavy mental activity. At the same time, using your brain will be rewarded and necessary when progressing in the game. This, of course, is easier said then done…